One of the most challenging issues facing telecommunications networks today is how to handle roaming traffic to and from disparate networks, which should involve not only routing plain user traffic, but also routing services that people might wish to use when they roam. Currently, the services are routed back to the home network, and there is no mechanism for the roamer to obtain the same or similar services using the “visited” (or “roaming”) network in order to maintain the user's service continuity.
In this regard, current networks operate under a “bit pipe” model where the network is agnostic to the data it carries. In a bit pipe, bits representing the traffic for the home network travel through the visited network, which merely forwards those bits on for handling by the home network. Thus, a current problem is that when users roam to a visited network, all of the traffic is backhauled to the home network, treating the visited network as an unintelligent bit pipe where bits enter one end of the pipe from the user's wireless portable device and exit the pipe where forwarded to the home network, with no intelligent processing of the bits by the visited network except to ascertain the home network to which to forward the bits.
A clear problem with such networks is that the visited network does not have knowledge of what the service is that the user may be requesting through the bit pipe, and thus, even where the visited network may possess the capability to wholly or partially process the bits without involving the home network, the visited network must blindly forward or “backhaul” the bits to the home network for processing.
However, there are transport costs to the home network for handling roaming traffic to/from the home network. For instance, the home network operator is required to pay the GRX interconnection provider to backhaul all the traffic to the home network from the visited network in this manner. Moreover, the home network must allocate resources to handle roaming traffic received from visited networks as well as traffic received directly by the home network. This can become expensive when home network traffic is already congested during busy hours, as a result of which, the home network needs to over-provision its capacity and processing load in order to support additional roaming traffic. As a result, the user experience is inconsistent and unmanageable when user is roaming and trying to request services.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to allow visited networks to process some roaming traffic directly without passing the data blindly back to the home network. It would be further desirable to define a mechanism that allows a visited network to dynamically analyze whether roaming traffic should be forwarded to the home network, or processed directly by the visited network. It would be still further desirable to provide policy based service awareness in connection with such a mechanism in order to classify a service that is requested in a visited network and to apply one or more policies from the home network to the classification by the visited network to determine how resulting traffic should flow to satisfy requests for service on the visited network.
Solutions to these and other deficiencies of the state of the art of roaming in telecommunications networks are thus desirable.